Course requirements
Credit will not be given until you have completed the approximate equivalent of a half time semester of work. This is roughly 300 hours. You can accumulate this on any schedule that works for you or for your employer, but you need about 15 weeks of equivalent half time experience.
If your internship work was mainly in the Summer, you MUST register for M&IS 44292 in that same summer.
To get a grade for M&IS 44292, CIS Internship, you must, by the end of the term you registered in, 1) turn in an Internship Activity Report, 2) do an End-of-Term Presentation, and 3) turn in a PowerPoint file containing your presentation slides. You must complete the course requirements before final exam week of the semester in which you registered for M&IS 44292!
The purpose of these requirements is to provide insights into the world of IS work to current IS students who might be considering internships, and to all IS students who are preparing to interview for post-graduation jobs.
Rather than being delivered in traditional paper form, both the report and the presentation must be in electronic form so that they can be posted on this WWW site for the world to see. Your report will be either in Microsoft Word or HTML format, and the presentation must be in Microsoft PowerPoint. Details follow.
Your Grade in the Internship
Beginning with the Summer 2006 term plus/minus grading will be utilized in this course. Only submitted work that shows superior effort will warrant a grade of 'A', just "meeting the requirements" will receive A- or below.
The internship course is not an automatic "A." To get an "A" I expect to see a Powerpoint presentation on the order of 15 or more slides that not only discuss how you got hired, but contain substantive descriptions of what you did on the job, including copies of some actual work products. I want to see examples of specific work products, hear about teams and organizational setups, read about the technical systems environment, etc. Spend more time talking about the job and less about the externalities, such as how you interviewed....For the Word activity log, "A" work has substantive content. A four page summary of what you did at work is insufficient.
Remember, what you turn in for the course credit will be displayed on the web site for the world to see, and will stay here after you graduate. Poor quality work will de-market your career.
Internship Activity Report (Word file)
Work on the activity report begins as soon as you are hired. Completion of the Internship Activity Report should be done after your internship work has been completed but may be done, if needed to submit for the term you registered in, while the internship is in progress as long as the majority of the work constituting the internship has been completed. Contents of the report should be approximately as follows.
Do not put anything in your report that your employer would consider confidential or corporate-critical.
Section 1.0 -- Getting the Job
o Section 1.1 Advertising Your Availability -- Describe how you went about preparing your resume. Were there any good examples you found and followed? Did you get any particularly good advice from anyone or from a book? If so, what was the book? Explain where you sent/posted your resume. If you used the Career Planning and Placement Service at the university, explain how you signed up with them and how you placed your resume with them.
o Section 1.2 Finding Out About Job Openings -- Explain all the sources you made use of to find out about internship job openings: professors, this web site, classified ads in the paper, postings on Internet placement services, friends, family, a headhunter service...? Where did you find out about the jobs for which you specifically interviewed?
o Section 1.3 Landing Your Internship -- Relate in this section how you contacted the employer with whom you actually interned. Did you call them or did they call you? Did you initially talk directly with an IS person or with a Human Relations or other non-IS employee of the company? Describe the interview and the visit to the site. What did you do well? What would you do differently if you had it to do over again? Here is where you can pass advice on to students who will be following you.
Section 2.0 -- About the Job
o Section 2.1 Employer -- List your employer, the specific job location, the hours/days that are representative of your work schedule, what section you work in, the number of employees in that section and what they do, the role of the IS people in that section, and so forth.Talk about the immediate "customers" and "suppliers" for you immediate work section. Who is you immediate supervisor and what is her or his job title? What is the pace of work like in the company?
o Section 2.2 Your Job -- Talk about what you do. Were you hired to do a specific job? What technical skills did your employer expect you to have on arrival in the job? What training opportunities did you get? Did you travel in the job? What are your co-workers like? Are there other interns? What schools are they from? Talk about the work you did in as much detail as possible without disclosing any company-confidential information.
Section 3.0 -- Daily Activity Log
o Keep a "diary." It need not be extensive, but make two or three sentences of commentary in the work log each day, describing generally what you did that day, problems you ran into, solutions that were worked out. Obviously, you need to omit personal or company-sensitve information, as this log will be available to the public on the WWW. The purpose of the daily log is to give other students a view into different kinds of IS job roles, different kinds of companies, and different areas of techncal specialization so that they can make the best possible career choices for themselves. If you are already interning now, you need not go backward in time to create diary entries. Just start right now making the entries and go forward from this date with them. It will not be necessary to have four months of entries if you are picking up on this requirement in the middle of your internship. If you have already completed the internship, create some "diary" material from memory.
Section 4.0 -- Career Advice for Current IS Students
o Comment on what parts of the coursework you have had in college (IS and non-IS courses as well) that were helpful to you in the internship role. This information will be very useful to students who have not yet interned in picking their electives. What kinds of training beyond coursework would benefit you in the job? Are the others in your intern company who have or are working on certifications such as Microsoft MCSE, or on Oracle or Novell certifications? What is your advice to current IS students in terms of the best things they can be doing while still in school to start their professional careers in the most positive possible way?
How to Turn It In: When the report is complete, put it together into Microsoft Word format or HTML format. If you want to add some special features, photos, screen clips, audio, links to the company where you worked or to sites related to the systems you worked on, that would be very highly desirable, and will help assure that you get an "A." Remember -- the goal of this material is to tell students who have not yet interned as much as you possibly can about what the real work world is really like...! Send the electronic files to Alan Brandyberry (abrandyb@kent.edu) for inclusion in this WWW site. Your files will be archived on the site for years to come, so do a clean, professional job.
End of Term Presentation (Powerpoint file)
You need to prepare approximately a 15 minute formal standup presentation on your internship experience. The content can more or less parallel the content of the Internship Activity Report (above) if you wish. If you want to use a different format, that's totally OK. You will be making the presentation in an IS class at Kent. Remember -- the goal of the presentation is to give your audience as much feel as possible about what it is like to intern, what you worked on, and why an internship might be a good thing for them to consider. Make the presentation real. Include project materials that you worked on, documentation you wrote, code samples, reports and printouts, data models -- anything that makes the work seem most real.
Do not put anything in your presentation that your employer would consider confidential or corporate-critical.
The delivery needs to be professional, and it needs to be canned in electronic form using PowerPoint so that it can be placed on this WWW site for students and employers to see.
How to Turn It In: When it's complete, send a PowerPoint file to Alan Brandyberry (abrandyb@kent.edu). You can do this before or after you do the actual presentation, but obviously your grade for the course won't be posted until after the file is turned in.
